Card Check: Seeing Unicorns and Rainbows in Hades

The New York Times is attempting to spin gold from straw, telling us unicorns are real, expecting the Tooth Fairy to bring a windfall. At least, that is what it seems if we are to believe the Times’ fantasy card check union story from April 20. You see, the Times believes that an overwhelming anti-union vote held via secret ballot is proof that card check is necessary.

This pretzel logic insists that the employer in question was so underhanded that even a secret ballot was corrupted by the efforts by the employer to scare off employees from supporting the union. But, here is the thing that makes no sense: if the ballot is secret, since no employee’s name was connected to the vote, and if the employer was that mean to the workers, WHY did they still vote against the union?

What lesson are we to take from this story? Is it that management intimidated the nurses so badly that they somehow forced the nurses to vote against unionization in secret, even though they had publicly signed cards supporting the organizing effort? Does that make any sense at all? The obvious explanation is that the act of getting signed cards does not accurately reflect the wishes of the workers, and that any intimidation that occurred would have impacted the card-check process — where people are public about their positions — rather than in the secret ballot that followed.

Spot on. Rather than a better reflection of what workers want, we will see card check forcing unions on employees that don’t want the union even IF they harbor some hard feelings against the employer.

Why are unions so headstrong on denying the workers the right to chose for themselves in the proper, traditionally democratic way? It can only be that unions are more interested in power than in the worker’s needs. And the card check feature of the woefully misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will lead them to that end.